Tuesday, August 08, 2017

Bellingham, WA. similar in size of land area to San Francisco.

While discussing housing during our Sunday LGBTQ walk, Betty Desire, brought up an interesting perspective. The cities of San Francisco and Bellingham both have the same land area. Around 700,000 people live in San Francisco while only around 80,000 live in Bellingham. We can build more housing, smaller footprint housing and so forth. There just has to be the will.

Of course overpopulation is a big problem, world wide, but that's yet another story. I don't know if the world can (or should) go past 7 billion current residents. World population is still growing tho slowing. Bellingham isn't likely to go to 700,000 anytime soon, but we can accommodate more people. Seems like quite a few people want to live in Bellingham. There are quite a few apartment and condo complexes under construction. This might ease the shortage.

I feel very fortunate as I still have affordable rent, myself, but several friends of mine are literally being pushed out of this area. People who's lives aren't necessarily about money.

It isn't just a simple matter of people and space. Economics, in this country, isn't working either. I think low interest rates have worked against us, rather than in our favor. Low interest rates were designed to stimulate job growth, which has happened to some extent, but at the same time, low interest rates can lead to what economists call "asset bubbles."

Property, as a commodity, has gone up so far in value that it's outstripped most of the rest of the economy and its the whole economy that creates the jobs, not just the value of assets.

The gap between property inflation and jobs is especially evident, here in Bellingham, where most of the residential money seems to come from retirement. Bellingham is ranked among the worse metro areas, in USA, for affordability of housing compared to the local job market. Other cities may have even more expensive housing, but many of their jobs tend to pay more. More depressed areas have cheaper housing. This is a nationwide problem, but it seems to afflict Bellingham particularly bad.

The whole situation could change for the better if we had the will to make it work. I'm hoping some of the construction that I see around town can ease the shortage a bit. It will take more than just that to solve this; like a new mindset for lower footprint lifestyles. Density as a way to curb sprawl and so forth. Good planning. I know, everyone has their own definition of good planning, but we can do better.